“I am looking for something still more mysterious: for the path you read about in books, the old lane choked with undergrowth whose entrance the weary prince could not discover. You’ll only come upon it at some lost moment of the morning when you’ve long since forgotten that it will soon be eleven, or twelve… Then, as you are awkwardly brushing aside a tangle of branches, your arms at the same time trying to protect your face, you suddenly catch a glimpse of a dark tunnel of green at the far end of which

there is a tiny aperture of light.”

Le Grand Meaulnes aka The Wanderer (1967)
Director: Jean-Gabriel Albicocco
Stars: Brigitte Fossey, Jean Blaise, Alain LiboltLe Grand Meaulnes is the only novel by French author Alain-Fournier. Fifteen-year-old François Seurel narrates the story of his relationship with seventeen-year-old Augustin Meaulnes as Meaulnes searches for his lost love. Impulsive, reckless and heroic, Meaulnes embodies the romantic ideal, the search for the unobtainable, and the mysterious world between childhood and adulthood.

The hero of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road carries just one book during his three-year sojourn across America. It is the novel Le Grand Meaulnes, written 100 years ago by French writer Alain-Fournier. F. Scott Fitzgerald was inspired by its title to copy it for his own The Great Gatsby, and Henry Miller claimed to love the novel’s hero. John Fowles said the book influenced everything he wrote, and he described it as “the greatest novel of adolescence in European literature.” [>]

“But once a man has taken a step in Paradise, how can he afterwards get used to living like everyone else? The things that make up the happiness of other people seemed ludicrous to me. And when, one day, quite sincerely and deliberately, I decided to behave as others do, that day I stored up enough remorse to last a long time….”